London is an art gallery. You can find renowned museums, historical statues and modern installations but if you keep your eyes open you can find art on almost every corner. To some artists literally everything is a canvas – walls, floors, road signs and whatever else they can transform into truly inspiring masterpieces.
East London in particular has an incredibly rich street art scene. Just around the corner from our office at Exmouth Market for instance you can still see the remains of one of Banksy’s graffitis. But there is much more to discover! Have you ever noticed the miniature people past-ups of Mexican artist Pablo Delgado around Brick Lane and Hoxton? Delgado leaves his mark with tiny little people at the bottom of walls but if you don’t look down, you probably won’t notice them.
You might have also overlooked the colorful flowers of NYC street artist Michael De Feo which subtly embellish mailboxes and scaffolding around London or Bortusk Leer’s lovely neon monsters that smile cheerfully from walls.
While you can see a lot of creative street art prominently displayed, much of it needs to be discovered with open eyes and an open mind! Many of us might not be used to it but changing perspective often helps – look down to discover the miniature people or up on roofs for installations. You can often discover creativity at spots that you would not expect them. It’s almost like a treasure hunt for art and inspiration.
A change of perspective and the open mind you need to discover some of the pieces might also be what promotes the popularity of street art. There is something so fascinating about this style of art. It’s raw, refreshing, naive and sometimes provocative and completely captivating.
This is probably the reason why it has caught the eye of marketing individuals, too. To reinforce the brand’s ties with urban culture Red Bull teamed up with Google earlier this year and developed Street Art View – a collection of sites from Google Street View showcasing crowd-sourced street art from all over the globe. Anyone can submit and tag their favourite graffiti and help build the world’s largest street art collection. In the first week the project had more than 300.000 visits and was grant with a silver award at The Cannes Lions Festival this year.
Shop owners and even more mainstream venues such as restaurants are also embracing graffiti to promote their venues. In Australia local authorities are supporting people to bring creativity to the streets by providing more legal walls.
Increasingly popular for marketing activities are 3D street paintings as they have – if well done – great potential to draw a crowd.
While some people queue for the museums, you can also stroll through the back streets and discover the delights of London’s rich street art scene to get a different perspective on creativity. Discover it on your own or get inspired with a guided tour. I have been on the tour myself recently and can highly recommend it.
In any case, let us know what interesting discoveries you make!
Great post Peggy – I really want to go on the tour now. It’s amazing how big and diverse the street art scene is.
Great art to be found everywhere in London, including on discarded chewing gum. Ben Wilson has been creating tiny paintings on bits of gum over the past 6 years. You can find some 10,000 of his miniatures on the streets of north London.
http://laughingsquid.com/artist-creates-tiny-paintings-on-discarded-chewing-gum/
Its interesting the difference in styles across London. The street art in the East is alot more “arty” than the rest of London, which is generally more hardcore graffiti based.
Also I noticed one of Invader’s mosaics on St John Steet the other day – black and yellow. At least I think it’s Invader. It looks like that anyway.
There is so much stuff to discover! We should have our own little map in the office where we tag our finds.
@Phil – I think the authorities in East London are more relaxed about it as the street art kind of forms the character of the area. That’s probably why we see more creativity here. There used to be a great Banksy graffiti off Oxford Street which was painted over in within just a week unfortunately.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1895625/Banksy-pulls-off-daring-CCTV-protest-in-London.html
I love the alleyway beneath Waterloo which leads to Lower Marsh St. It’s a graffiti-friendly zone and has a sort of pastiche effect as work is concentrated in one area.
Check out the Bristol Street Art project. They have whole streets in Bristol where street artists can leave their mark
http://www.bristol-street-art.co.uk/